Yesterday I was talking to a friend who is pro-war but increasingly ambivalent about what’s become of our venture in Iraq.

And we were speculating — not rhetorically but in some real sense thinking out loud — about how the president and his top aides could have ignored so many signs for so long that things were going seriously wrong.

Then you see something like this, and everything becomes a bit clearer.

Asked about the National Intelligence Estimate he received two months ago, which painted a bleak outlook for Iraq, the president said the CIA was “just guessing … The Iraqi citizens are defying the pessimistic predictions.”

In one ear and out the other.

Doesn’t that tell you a lot about how we got to this juncture?

As Andrew Sullivan I think suggests in this post, the president and I dare say many of his supporters have little ability to distinguish between resolution, optimism and denial.

Front line in the war against terror …

Today, according to the AP, Cat Stevens was “denied admission to the United States on national security grounds.”

When Homeland Security officials found that Stevens — who now goes by the name Yusuf Islam — was flying on a plane from London to Washington, DC they diverted the plane to Bangor, Maine.

He was expelled from the US after a brief interview.

In the final throes of a presidential campaign, the depth and breadth of a foreign policy debate are necessarily highly constricted. I am extremely pleased that John Kerry is now making the case against the President’s Iraq policy in an aggressive and frontal fashion. But the thrust of that critique is inevitably on the policy’s manifest failures rather than its intellectual and policy underpinnings.

A side note: It’s revealing — and the Kerry campaign should make something of it — that whenever Kerry attacks Bush’s management of the war all the Bush team can do is attack the alleged contradictions in Kerry’s position on the war. That may work politically. But it’s awfully telling. They have, quite literally, no response on the merits. Kerry should point that out and tell the president to stop making excuses for endangering the country.

In any case, back to the debate over foreign policy and war. If you’re interested in getting more deeply into the questions raised by the Iraq war — not WMD and troop strength, but the mix of empire, violence and democratic idealism — I cannot recommend strongly enough John Judis’ new book The Folly of Empire.

The book is half history, half polemic. Much of the historical focus is on America’s experience as an incipient imperial power from the final years of the 19th century through the first two decades of the 20th century. The key events are the bloody war America fought to put down the Philipine rebellion and the ill-fated American intervention in Mexico. This Judis contrasts with a very different approach to foreign affairs that prevailed — with relative consensus and consistency among presidents of both parties — from Franklin Roosevelt until Bill Clinton. It was a model that in key ways grew out of the sobering experience of this imperialist interlude when America’s deep-seated and in most ways benign missionizing impulses were wedded to the imperalism that would soon shake Europe, and much of the globe, to its foundations.

The image of Teddy Roosevelt that emerges from this book is very different from that which has been in vogue in recent years in Washington, DC. And in our current moment, when TR and Wilson loom so large in our historical imagination and disfigured latter-day versions of them direct our nation’s affairs, it is an instructive examination of how the thirst for domination can masquerade as idealism, often in a toxic fashion fooling even itself.

With the US completely isolated and in a Mesopotamian snake pit, it’s not hard to argue that President Bush’s own special model of petulant unilateralism has been ineffective in securing American interests and security. But if you want to get more deeply into this — how lessons of the past were ignored, how vacuous idealism can slide into hubris and then disaster — this is the book.

Soon, another recommendation of a very different sort of book about empire: Hugh Thomas’s new Rivers of Gold.

Surprise, surprise …

“A year from now, I’ll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush.”

Richard Perle
AEI Keynote speech
September 22, 2003

PS. Note of thanks to reader MW for the heads up.

PPS. This site seems to have had the quote up days ago, so credit where credit is due. They also have the sound clip for your listening pleasure.

The article in today’s Post on the indictments of three top aides to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay mentions that one of them is John Colyandro, the executive director of DeLay’s political action committee, Texans for a Republican Majority (aka TRMPAC — an acronym which might perhaps be a subtle homage to DeLay’s earlier partying days).

What it doesn’t mention is that Colyandro is a one-time right-hand-shark to Karl Rove.

In fact Colyandro was at the center of one of Rove’s uglier dirty-tricks from his Texas political days — a story that is told in all its lizardly detail in a magazine article that’s coming out about Rove next week.

Actually, after reading the article, you’ll start to see that the whole Swift Boat business was pretty mild for what Rove is capable of.

If (or maybe ‘when’?) he really wanted to lower the boom, or imitate past practice, we’d probably be hearing that Kerry was running his Swift Boat like an after-party for a Village People concert circa 1979. Or that when Kerry really wanted to party on the Delta he’d head to the local orphanage for a good time.

In Newsweek this afternoon, Mike Isikoff and Mark Hosenball have a piece that touches on the fact that the FBI still hasn’t managed to interview Rocco Martino, the guy at the center of the forged Niger uranium documents story. They put the question to the FBI and were told by a “U.S. law-enforcement official … [that] the FBI is seeking to interview Martino, but has not yet received permission to do so from the Italian government.”

Please.

The Bureau may well be looking to interview Martino now that they’ve been put on the spot.

But are they really willing to take ‘no’ for an answer from the Italians?

And more to the point, if it’s really a jurisdictional issue, why didn’t they try to interview Martino last month when he was in New York?

Or if not then, how about when he flew here in June?

The White House is now saying that it’s imperative to get to the bottom of who’s behind the CBS Memo forgeries. And they’re right. But the US government has never made any serious effort to find out who is behind the Niger uranium forgeries.

Why not?

Is Prime Minister Allawi actually part of the Bush campaign? Or is he registered as a 527?

Another poll, Fox News/Opinion Dynamics: Bush 45%, Kerry 43% among likely voters. And this is in line with other recent ‘likely voter’ poll numbers. Of the five soundings of likely voters from the last week, the most recent (albeit a Dem poll) had a tie. Before that there was one with a four point spread (NBC/WSJ), two with a three point spreads (Zogby and IBD) and another with a four point spread (GWU Battleground).

“The path to our safety and to Iraq’s future as a democratic nation lies in the resolute defense of freedom. If we stop fighting the terrorists in Iraq, they would be free to plot and plan attacks elsewhere, in America and other free nations. To retreat now would betray our mission, our word, and our friends.”

That’s President Bush from his appearance today with Prime Minister Allawi of Iraq.

Sentence one is certainly an arguable proposition and not without some merit, though it’s bundled with so much rhetoricical mush as to have little concrete meaning. I think you can say the same thing for sentence three.

But surely sentence number two is pure foolishness. “If we stop fighting the terrorists in Iraq, they would be free to plot and plan attacks elsewhere, in America and other free nations.”

Does anyone even possibly believe this is true? They’re trapped in Iraq? We’ve got them pinned down so they can’t hatch plots against US or European targets? ‘The terrorists’ are so busy with the insurgency in Iraq that they can’t spare a few Mohammad Attas to blow stuff up over here?

Think about …

Talk about unorthodox.

A journalist — Marc Sandalow, Washington Bureau Chief <$NoAd$>of the San Francisco Chronicle — decided to discuss charges that John Kerry has waffled on Iraq policy by actually going back and reviewing his record as expressed in policy statements, speeches and votes.

Not surprisingly, he found Kerry has had pretty much the same position since the whole Iraq debate started …

[A]n examination of Kerry’s words in more than 200 speeches and statements, comments during candidate forums and answers to reporters’ questions does not support the accusation [of flip-flopping]. As foreign policy emerged as a dominant issue in the Democratic primaries and later in the general election, Kerry clung to a nuanced, middle-of-the road — yet largely consistent — approach to Iraq …

[T]aken as a whole, Kerry has offered the same message ever since talk of attacking Iraq became a national conversation more than two years ago.

Someone’s got to talk to this Sandalow guy and straighten him out. Maybe someone from CNN?